My plane touches down just before eight in the evening. Moscow’s sky is still lucent, the undersides of the copper clouds catching the last of the long day’s sun.

I call Lenny from my cab. He’s spirited in his usual way as we talk about where to meet for dinner. “You like sirloin, Pop? Good, good. Or maybe Italian, pasta ’n’ clams?”

Great, I say, leaving out the fact that I’m never hungry after a long flight.

“Or, no, Armenian!” he pursues. “I know just the place.” He tells me he’ll take me to the most prikol’ny spot in my neighborhood. By the time I arrive at my hotel, he’s listed off a couple more places we can go, demonstrating his expertise in the local cuisine and hinting at his personal knowledge of the chefs. For a moment I wonder if he’s forgotten who he’s talking to and thinks I’m a client. Then again, maybe it’s all to remind his old papa what an undislodgeable native—what a Muscovite—he’s become.

Within an hour I’m out of my steaming, sanitized hotel shower, toweling off and preparing to meet my son for our late dinner. Outside, the air is warm, pleasantly intimate, as if a sea is lurking somewhere behind all those blazing pastel façades. Tverskaya Street is immaculately groomed, almost Swiss in its cleanliness. Not a stray cigarette butt about, even though every person who passes me seems to be smoking his little heart out. The mood is almost—how can I say it?—festive enough to make me regret my earlier cynical thoughts about Lenny. His manic enthusiasm on the phone was probably just a sign that he’s pleased to see his dad. For all my son’s muddled allegiances, he has always been sincere about wanting everyone around him to be happy. Only, tonight he has no idea about the bucket of ice water that I’m obligated to toss on his variety show. In my briefcase, I’m carrying ten pounds of glossy paperback GMAT textbooks—a present from Lenny’s mother, who’s told me I shouldn’t bother coming home until I’ve convinced our son to do the “only reasonable thing.”

I console myself that I’m only following orders while I inhale the flatulence of car exhaust, the faint reek of wet varnish, the after-scent of spilled beer, which remind me that I am in a city that I know far better than my son does. In the course of my visits I’ve started to think of Moscow as a complicated woman I was closely entwined with in my youth, but who, in our late-life encounters, has surprised me by not aging gracefully (as I have) but instead rejuvenating herself with a succession of increasingly more expensive face-lifts. Each time we meet, I notice some new augmentation: A Canali boutique where once stood a pharmacy. Gaudy casino lights in place of a familiar pawnshop. Even the glass pyramid atop the mayor’s new office, which I spied on my drive here, is as obscenely radiant as a marquise-cut diamond on the finger of an oilman’s dame. Tverskaya in particular was so collagened and siliconed that I’ve long stopped thinking of her as the Gorky Street of my youth. Tonight I pass whole blocks under renovation, girdled by scaffolds, corseted and draped in jade-colored nets beneath which all sorts of nips and tucks are being discreetly performed.

I’m the first to arrive at the restaurant, a cheerily domestic, half-empty Armenian joint. A furry-browed waiter leads me in and hands me, inexplicably, a second menu in English.

Lenny arrives, looking freshly shaved and ten pounds heavier than I remember. I point to the English menu. “What gave me away? I don’t look or sound any more foreign than the maître d’.”

“Look around you,” says Lenny. “Who else asks to be seated in the nonsmoking section?”

He’s right! We’re the only ones in our dungeony corner of the dining room. Which is probably for the best: At the other end of the hall is a noisy party of six trunk-necked gentlemen, their banquet table looking like it’s about to snap under the weight of a forest of bottles. Across the room I can hear one of them pursuing some pointless slurring story about a time he boxed a kangaroo.

“You look good,” I tell my son, not entirely truthfully.

“I’m trying to stay fit,” he says, to my surprise.

“Oh yeah?”

“Been playing a little tennis.”

I take his word for it, though he looks more like a tennis ball than a tennis pro. Also, he’s let his hair get too long at the neck, combing it back like a pimp’s. A shame. Lenny is a good-looking guy when he takes care of himself. “So what’s your plan for the week?” he says.

I tell him: I’m here just until Monday, together with my boss, Tom, who’s arriving tomorrow. We’re reviewing bids for shipping contractors. “We’re looking for a charter company to pilot some shuttle tankers from the Nanatz coast to a terminal near Murmansk.” I’m surprised Lenny doesn’t remember. “It’s the joint venture I was telling you about, with L____ Petroleum.”

He cocks his eyebrow. “L-Pet? You’re in business with them? Those guys are the Kremlin’s lapdog. They’re practically a branch of the FSB.”

“We don’t get involved in their politics. This should be pretty straightforward.”

Then, just to remind me how much better he knows this place than I do, he says, “Nothing here is straightforward.”

There’s a vitreous crash at the other end of the dining room. “Now look what you’ve done, Sava,” says one of the bald gentlemen, a gorilla in a lavender shirt. The waiter is called in to clean up while poor Sava tries to finish his kangaroo story. He doesn’t have a chance. The lavender-clad gospodin announces he’s tired of the whole circus and tells the others to “clean him up.”

“How is Katya?” I ask while Sava is dragged out of the room between sets of oak-sized arms.

Lenny makes a sucking breath. “It’s over. More or less.”

I try to do a good impression of looking upset by his news. Katya is a perfectly nice girl. I’ve even gotten used to the little baptismal cross she is never without, and her affection for interpreting dreams and reading the future in the dregs of her Turkish coffee. Ever since he’s moved to Moscow, I’ve given up on a woman of character for Lenny. But is it too much to ask for someone whose perspective on twentieth-century history is not that “the monstrosity of Soviet communism was a curse delivered on the Russian people for the crime of slaying their tsar”? Yes, my son is dating a monarchist.

“So which is it?” I say. “More, or less? Has she moved out?”

“No, but we’ve agreed to see other people.”

“Now, how does that work? Does one of you take the couch while the other has a date?”

He looks more upset by this joke than I think is called for. “She’ll move out as soon as I can help her get her own place.”

“Well, that shouldn’t be too hard,” I say encouragingly. “It’s a big city. Plenty of apartments.”

“You kidding? The rents here are worse than in New York.”

I study his face for a moment. “Lenny, you haven’t told her that you’ll be paying her rent. Right?”

He recites once more the story of how Katya “abandoned” her family and job in St. Petersburg to move to Moscow for him. She can’t afford to live on her own and can’t go back to Peter because her mother’s lover has recently moved into the family apartment. “Everything’s become very complicated.”

“Complicated for her, not for you.”

“You don’t understand how it’s done.”

“Is there a protocol?” I inquire. “I mean, for paying the rent of a woman you don’t want to live with anymore? Are you a don who needs a goomah to shtup once a week? Even that I might understand. At least it’s logical. But what I’m hearing is you don’t want this person at all.”

“Drop it, Pa,” he says. Only he doesn’t. Instead, he starts enumerating Katya’s myriad virtues—her kindness and gentleness and dedication to him. I dare not ask why anyone would want to leave such a saint. “You and I are different people,” he tells me stoically.

I grin and bear this. “All right, Lenny,” I say, “but even decency has to be matched by means. Where are you going to get the funds to pay this alimony? Are you working right now?”

The color leaves his face. He rakes his bitten fingers through his hair. “I knew it. Nobody in this family can keep their goddamn mouth shut.”

“So your sister told us. So what? If you’re in trouble, we want to help.”

“Did she tell you how Austin and the rest of my friends sold me down the river?”

“At least now you know who your friends are. Druzhba druzhboi a tabachok vroz’.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not crying over it. I’ve already got some opportunities lined up.”

I bite my lip. “Maybe you shouldn’t be rushing into something so soon. Take some time. Think about all your options.”

He doesn’t answer right away. “What do you suggest?” he says at last in a tone mistakable for either despair or sarcasm.

I seize my opportunity and remove the two GMAT tomes from my briefcase. Lenny winces as if he’s just watched me drop soiled underpants on the table. “Let me guess whose idea this was.”

I smile. “I’ve got another two in my hotel room.”

“Is this supposed to be some kind of bait?”

“It’s a serious offer, Lenny. You come back home. Live with us for a few months, or as long as you want. Study. Once you get into business school, we can help pay for the first year.”

“And Mama can bring cucumber-and-bologna sandwiches up to my room, right? I’m thirty-four, for chrissake, not sixteen.”

Before I can bite my tongue, I say, “And what’s your plan? To stay here and compete with the homegrown phys-mat geniuses?”

The hurt on his face is more immense than I expected.

“You and Ma still think a framed degree is the answer to everything. It’s your fucking immigrant delusion.”

“Come on, Lenny.” I try to smile.

“And anyway, I’m too old to go back to school.”

I see a chance to redeem myself. “You’re not too old. I was two years older than you when I left this country and started over.” But I can already hear my wife’s admonishments about talking about myself. According to her, all my advice to Lenny boils down to “how you’re a something and he’s a nothing.” I suspect some of this is the influence of our daughter, Masha, a champion of Freudian analysis, who likes to say that my upbringing by a single, psychologically “damaged” mother has made me “second-generation dysfunctional.”

“Look,” I say, “you’ve been here—what—nine years? I happen to know that every seven years a man is released from all his obligations. He can wipe his hands, walk away, start clean. Take a look in the Torah if you don’t believe me. It’s called the Sabbatical Year.”

He stares at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Since when have you been cracking the Torah?”

I smile. “You don’t have to decide right now. Just—consider it.” I get up, beckoned by the men’s room, and leave Lenny to do just that.

When I get to the toilets, I find my entry blocked by a tiny babushka with a short-handled broom. I step right. So does she. I make a move to the left, but she’s one step ahead of me, serenely determined not to let me pass. She flashes me an apologetic gold-toothed grin and points to the women’s room. I decide I’d rather hold it in. I turn around and rejoin Lenny at the table.

We eat in silence for a while, the GMAT books between us like the Berlin Wall. Finally, he says, “What the hell is going on over there?” I look up. One of the stooges who’d dragged Sava to the men’s room is back. His hand seems to be bleeding. He plucks a cloth napkin from the table, wraps it tourniquet-style around his meaty palm, and upends half a bottle of vodka on the wound. Then, like nothing, he sits back down with the others and resumes drinking. The gentleman in lavender tosses some bills into the general chaos of the table and within a minute the rest of them take their cue and are heading for the door. I figure it’s as good a time as any to revisit the little boy’s room. To my relief, the babushka isn’t standing guard anymore. But when I swing open the door she’s right there, perched on a footstool and sponging the mirrors above the sinks. A clean arc of crimson spatter covers both of our reflections. I shut myself in the stall. From the neighboring stall issue retching sounds, punctuated by almost prim gasps of strangled respiration. As I leave I give a captain’s salute to the babushka sponging blood off the tiles.

“All right, I’ll take the books,” he says when I come back. “If you promise to stop bugging me about coming home.”

“I have my orders, Lenny.”

He slides them back to me.

“Please, just keep them. I can’t take them back to your mother.”

He shakes his head. And then, as if on cue, drunken Sava is back. From the men’s room he weaves his way between the empty tables like a passenger swaying in the aisle of a train. His misbuttoned shirt is covered with unspeakable stains. A cloud of panicked disappointment steals over his face as he realizes his friends have all left him. Lenny and I trade glances as bruised, bloodied Sava staggers out through the glass doors, then pauses to look left and right, searching in vain for his friends and tormentors.

A grin opens up in Lenny’s face. “Velkom home, Dad!” he says, opening his arms ceremoniously. “Velkom home.”